Month: April 2016

[Image via the NIH Image Gallery. Photo by Alex Ritter, Jennifer Lippincott Schwartz, and Gillian Griffiths. Full video, complete with narration here.] Under the Radar: A series of listicles about biology concepts you definitely won’t find in newspaper headlines. #1: Be a Navigation App for Immune Cells Natural killer cells, or “NK cells” are the …

[Photo by Tomas Fano via Flickr/Creative Commons] Last August, a paper in Nature debuted with evidence supporting an idea that many suspected but few wanted to hear: If two teams of scientists run the same psychological experiment, the two sets of results end up mismatched. (In fact, when a network of 270 researchers retried 100 …

[“Stockpile” photo by Stephen Edmonds via Flickr/Creative Commons] This week, I’m taking a dollop of my own advice and building a “stockpile” of future posts for this blog. But like blogging itself, building a post stockpile requires a lot of guesswork. The Internet is fickle, and even though I have a pretty good idea of …

(A Highly Subjective Round-up of Standout Science News) [Photo above by Raúl Hernández González via Flickr & Creative Commons] How short is a shortform piece of journalism? Under 250 words? Where does that leave all the pieces clocking in at 500, 700, or 1200 words? Those were the first questions that reared their heads when …

[Photo courtesy of Brian Giesen via Creative Commons & Flickr] “Pitch Imperfect” is a series of blog posts where I highlight stories that I pitched but didn’t quite sell and discuss why it was tough to sell them. The goal is to share both interesting research stories and some of the obstacles in getting them …

[Portrait of an HIV virus by Dominic Alves via Creative Commons & Flickr] Y’know that feeling when you stumble across a study that makes you think, “Holy s***! Scientists actually did this!!!!”? And then like two weeks later, another team of scientists manages to kind of upstage the first team’s finding? It’s been that sort …